Approximately a third of all IT spending is consumed in the data center. With such a large share of IT Total Cost of Ownership (TCO) concentrated in the data center, changes in architecture can materially impact IT spend and corporate competitiveness. While the trends of virtualization and cloud computing offer data center architecture opportunities, there are also challenges. High-end data center design is challenged with increasing complexity, the need for greater workload mobility and reduced energy consumption. Traffic patterns have also shifted significantly, from primarily client-server or as commonly referred to as north-to-south flows, to a combination of client-server and server-server or east-to-west plus north-to-south streams. These shifts have wreaked havoc on application response time and end user experience, since the network is not designed for these Brownian motion type flows.
High availability in the data center refers not only to device-specific availability and uptime, but also to network design and features that prevent downtime in the case of a catastrophic event. Uptime in this context refers to availability of the switch to direct traffic. As more and more equipment is added to the data center network, the high availability of the network may be undermined. Network architects need to consider design best practices to reduce single points of failure and achieve network uptime goals in the data center.